Guerrilla Gardening

Performance, photo, 2020

North Saltivka is the district in Kharkiv, Ukraine, which is situated just on the city's edge. Its typical for 1980's nine-story panel houses border on the huge deserted grassland.

Some people that live there have occupied small pieces of it for the vegetable gardens. Many of them are elderly people or people with low income, and growing their own potatoes and cabbage really helps them to sustain themselves. But by law, they don't have any right to work on this land, because it wasn't privatized and doesn't belong to the nearby households, despite the fact that it lies just outside their windows. It is owned by the city, which takes
no care of it, leaving the land abandoned and uncultivated.

And every gardener working there is always on the alert, because any moment they may be kicked out and their gardens destroyed to free the area for another one trade center or a residential complex.

But still they keep struggling – by digging and planting, watering and harvesting - in an invisible guerrilla war for the better life their government couldn't (or didn't bother to) provide.

Project created in the frames of «Crossing» – German-Ukrainian digital residency by Artsvit gallery (Dnipro, Ukraine) and Verein PAERsche Aktions-Labor (Cologne, Germany).


(Note from the year 2022). After being bombed by Russian army for 2 months, this district was almost completely destroyed. Now it is a dead zone.